Brighton in Diaries E-Book

Paul K Lyons

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 386

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This fascinating collection of extracts contains diarists famous and ordinary, young and old, serious and cynical, but with Brighton always setting the scene. Many legendary writers - including Walter Scott, Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf (who described Brighton as 'a love corner for slugs') – inhabit these pages, often appearing in their most unguarded guises. Here also are less well-known characters, such William Tayler (a footman), Gideon Mantell (a surgeon and dinosaur bone collector), and Xue Fucheng (an early Chinese diplomat). There are also several diarists whose writing has never appeared in print before - Olive Stammer, for example, who kept a diary during the Second World War; and Ross Reeves, a young gay musician whose diary extracts are from 2005-2006. By turn insightful, hilarious and profound, Brighton in Diaries will delight residents and visitors alike.

Leseprobe

BRIGHTON

in Diaries

BRIGHTON

in Diaries

PAUL K LYONS

First published 2011

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Paul K Lyons, 2011, 2013

The right of Paul K Lyons to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5408 2

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

1Samuel Pepys and Charles II walking on the quarterdeck

2Peregrine Phillips takes an excursion or two

3That’s she, that’s the famous Miss Fanny Burney

4Joseph Farington, Englishman and painter

5Erredge’s history of Brighton and an anonymous diarist

6Lord Glenbervie, umbrage and an eyesore statue of the Prince

7Thomas Creevey dines at the Pavilion

8John Croker tries not to dine at the Pavilion

9Gideon Mantell, surgeon and fossil hunter

10Charles Greville, chronicler of histories

11Henry Edward Fox visits a watering-place

12Walter Scott, father and grandfather

13Thomas Raikes reminisces on racing and duels

14The servant and wretched bad writer, William Tayler

15Henry Crabb Robinson and the best preacher

16Xue Fucheng does as Londoners do

17Henry Peerless, Brightonian and holiday-maker

18Arnold Bennett at work on Clayhanger

19Lady Cynthia Asquith flirts through the First World War

20Virginia Woolf and Harold Nicolson

21Mass Observation and Olive Stammer in the Second World War

22A teenage Tony Simmonds experiences VE Day

23Three ‘Letter in the Attic’ diarists

24Des Marshall, the Urban Robinson Crusoe

25Ross Reeves finds his home

26Brighton and Me

References

Introduction

When Brighton and Hove was granted city status by Queen Elizabeth II as part of the millennium celebrations in 2000, it marked three centuries of extraordinary growth – from small fishing village to one of Britain’s largest and most dynamic places to live and visit. Today it boasts old-world and alternative shopping quarters, two universities and a large foreign student population, one of the finest piers in the country, as well as an atmospheric pier ruin, miles of wide beaches with clean water and busy promenades, magnificent Regency architecture, stunning picturesque curves of terraced houses on the many hills, an arts festival second only to Edinburgh, a large and colourful gay community which puts on a magnificent parade for all in the summer, and an open, innovative and busy music scene.

Go back more than 300 years, and Brighthelmstone, as it was then known (among various other spellings), was little more than a small harbour-less fishing town or village, without much protection from the weather or from French and Dutch raiders. The village’s first claim to any fame at all came in the mid-seventeenth century when the young and future King Charles II, escaping from Oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads, took refuge there for one night before secretly making his way the following morning to Shoreham where he boarded a coal-carrying coaster which carried him to safety in France. Ten years later, on returning to England, he recounted his adventures to another young man, Samuel Pepys, who recorded the details in his now-famous diary.

Terrific storms in 1703 and 1705 did great damage to the place. A description was written down by John Warburton who visited the coast in the early-eighteenth century. Having dismissed Hove as ‘a ruinous village’ which the sea is daily eating up, he writes:

A good mile further going along the beach I arrived at Bright-hem stead, a large ill-built irregular market town, mostly inhabited by seafaring men who choose their residence here as being situated on the main and convenient for their going on shore on their passing and repassing in the coasting trade. This town is likely to share the same fate with the last, the sea having washed away the half of it; whole streets being now deserted, and the beach almost covered with walls of houses being almost entire, the lime or cement being strong enough, when thrown down, to resist the violence of the waves.

Other travellers’ accounts – letters and retrospective narratives – of visiting Brighton start to emerge in the early part of the eighteenth century. John H. Farrant, an expert on Sussex’s history, has analysed these for the magazine Sussex Genealogist and Local Historian. The author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, for example, may have visited as early as 1712, when he found it ‘a poor fishing town, old built, and on the very edge of the sea’. A little later, during a visit around 1730, Revd John Burton (writing in Greek) described the men of the town as ‘hardy and industrious, and very skilful in naval matters and reported to be very dextrous in defrauding the revenue’, but also noted that the appearance of the town was ‘miserable’.

Soon afterwards, though, the town underwent rapid growth. This was largely thanks to Dr Richard Russell whose medical theories about the benefits of seawater transformed Brighton into a health resort. Writing in the late eighteenth century, Thomas Walker Horsfield put it this way in The History, Antiquities, and Topography of the County of Sussex: ‘Science invited fashion and fashion [. . .] has in the short space of half a century transformed the poor fishing village of bright Helmston into one of the gayest and grandest of our favourite abodes.’

One man drawn to Brighton by its growing reputation was Peregrine Phillips. Not much is known about him, except that he was a lawyer by profession, and the father of a famous West End actress, Mrs Crouch. Coming from Little Hampton, he did not much like Brighton at first, but it grew on him and he stayed for a couple of weeks in August 1778, and then came back the following August.

And it is thanks to Phillips that we have the first bona fide and substantial record of Brighton written in diary form. A brilliant diary it is too. Phillips took his pen and paper with him wherever he went, and wrote ‘On the Clift’ or ‘Upon the Sands’ or ‘On the Steyne’. He records anything and everything – from the sublime to the ridiculous – amusing anecdotes of people and colourful description of places. Moreover, one gets the sense that he loved his own diary voice, and took great pleasure in giving opinions on subjects large and small.

While Phillips was probably more typical of the professional and middle classes, high society had also begun to flourish in Brighton, thanks in part to King George III’s brother, the Duke of Cumberland, being a regular visitor. Thus, literary types, such as Henry and Hester Thrale and Dr Samuel Johnson, were drawn south to the coast. And with them came one Fanny Burney, a young writer of talent. Her first book published anonymously – Evelina – was a sensation, and she herself, when uncovered as the author, became a society star. More than a century later, Virginia Woolf called her ‘the mother of English fiction’, but today, she is also celebrated for her diaries, which she wrote assiduously for most of her life. They are justly famed for their literary quality as much as for their descriptions of society. Although she later married and became known as Madame D’Arblay, at the time of her visits to Brighton she was still very much a young woman interested in young men!

Fanny Burney’s diaries, in their most extensive edition, run to twelve volumes. Joseph Farington, a painter known in his day for topographical drawings but celebrated now for his diaries, betters that. Yale University published them in sixteen volumes, with a separate 1,000 page index. Farington, too, was drawn to Brighton, though he did not have much to say about the place. By 1802, the Prince of Wales had already become well-established. A first stage of the Pavilion had been built some years earlier, and the building of a second stage was underway. That year, Farington told his diary, the Prince was ‘much about, riding and walking’ and ‘takes much interest in building’.

Chronologically, the next diarist to have left behind interesting remarks about Brighton is anonymous. His or her diary is quoted in a history of Brighton by John Ackerson Erredge, the first substantial (and very entertaining) history of the town in fact. It was originally published in 1862, and was recently republished with a learned introduction by John Farrant. The anonymous diary entries are all from 1805 or 1807, apart from one in 1810, and have been included here along with samples of Erredge’s commentary – on the history of The Steine, for example, and the spread of ‘virulent pastimes’.

In late 1810, parliament deemed King George III’s mental health to be so unstable that it transferred his regal powers to his son, George, who formally became Prince Regent; until 1820 when his father died, and then he became king. This so-called Regency period (1811-1820) saw three very different politicians – who are remembered for their diaries – visiting Brighton.

Sylvester Douglas, later Lord Glenbervie, was hobnobbing, gadding about, and filling his diary with amusing anecdotes. More serious, even though they sound like a double act, were Creevey and Croker. Creevey was a Whig, and Croker a Tory, but both wrote diaries published respectively as The Creevey Papers and The Croker Papers.

Creevey was in Brighton in the autumn of 1811, dining at the Pavilion most nights, but at the same time was hardening his political stance against the Prince Re-gent’s political appointments. During that visit, indeed, he fell out with the Prince, and subsequently lived in Brussels for several years. Charles Greville, a more famous diarist, said ‘old Creevey is a living proof that a man may be perfectly happy and exceedingly poor. I think he is the only man I know in society who possesses nothing.’ Creevey, though, fixed his own very minor place in history by being the first civilian to interview the Duke of Wellington after the Battle of Waterloo.

Croker’s diary entries are taken from a few years later, in 1818, and show him as a more cynical observer than Creevey. One entry finds him complaining about the money the prince is spending on the Pavilion: ‘It is, I think, an absurd waste of money, and will be a ruin in half a century or sooner.’ In another, he comments on the Prince’s long-term female companion: ‘One reason why Mrs Fitzherbert may like this place is that she is treated as queen, at least of Brighton.’ The Prince had married the widow Maria Fitzherbert in 1785, but as the marriage had not been approved by his father or the Privy Council it was null and void.

Gideon Mantell was a very different sort of man, a surgeon by profession, but energetic and restless, often dissatisfied with his lot. He was born and brought up in Lewes, where he took over a successful practice. Ambition drove him to move his family home to the centre of Brighton where he hoped to attract rich patients from within the King’s entourage or the high society surrounding it. However, the nobility in Brighton became more intrigued by the collection of fossils, including dinosaurs before they were so named, in his home. His diaries are a delight, partly because he was such an active man, and partly because he was a keen observer of life. Typical of how his diary benefited from this restless energy was the time he raced to Brighton (he was not yet living there) to watch the sea during a tremendous gale and to brave walking on the Chain Pier: ‘The awful grandeur of the scene more than compensated for the inconvenience of our situation.’

One of the most important nineteenth-century British diarists, Charles Greville, visited Brighton often in the 1820s, usually on the King’s business but also to visit the racecourse. As a clerk to the Privy Council, he was, essentially, a high level civil servant. As such, one might expect his diaries to be more discrete than those of a leading politician, for example. But they are not. They are wonderfully indiscrete, so much so that when they were published after his death, both the Prime Minister at the time, Benjamin Disraeli, and Queen Victoria were outraged. Here is Greville on an early visit to Brighton: ‘I was curious to see the Pavilion and the life they lead there, and I now only hope I may never go there again, for the novelty is past, and I should be exposed to the whole weight of the bore of it without the stimulus of curiosity.’

Henry Edward Fox was another diarist who visited Brighton in the 1820s, during the reign of King George IV. He certainly spoke, rather wrote, his mind too, describing the English countryside as being full of ‘Lilliput ostentation’, and the Pavilion as a fairies’ palace. He also described, with some relish, a contentious report of him embracing ‘Lady L’ on the steps of the Chain Pier.

Walter Scott was a literary giant, the first real writer of historical novels, and the world’s first author of bestsellers. Some consider his diaries to be as brilliant as his novels, and it is a great shame that he did not start the diary habit until 1825, shortly before a financial crisis that would leave him in serious debt until his death in 1832. Scott did not like Brighton very much – he called it ‘a city of loiterers and invalids’ – and his visits during this latter period of his life were all connected with his daughter, Sophia, who had married a close friend, the writer and editor John Gibson Lockhart. Their first born child was sickly, and was taken to Brighton for his health, and it was there that a second son, Walter, named after his grandfather, was born.

Whereas Walter Scott famously faced up to his financial difficulties, Thomas Raikes – labelled as ‘dandy and diarist’ by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography – ran away to Paris for a decade to escape his financial troubles. While there, he kept a regular diary, though sometimes the entries are less about his present life, and more about the past, his life in England, including time at court with the King in Brighton. And he has colourful stories to tell, about race days and the betting scene on The Steine, and about a quarrel at the Castle Inn which led to a duel in which one of the participants fought naked.

After so many upper-class types, it comes as a refreshing change to see Brighton through the eyes of a more ordinary person. William Tayler was brought up in rural Oxfordshire but, for want of work, became a servant. On New Year’s Day in 1837 he decided to improve his writing and spelling by keeping a diary; and, though he had tried to keep a diary before, this was the first time he kept the resolution. Thus, when his employer decided to spend the summer in Brighton, the enterprising Mr Tayler, who used all his spare time to explore the new place, had plenty to write about. Despite his atrocious spelling, he wrote with a lively clear voice that conjures up pictures more interesting, or not even seen, by many of his better educated fellow diarists. Gideon Mantell may have braved ferocious waves on the Chain Pier, and Henry Fox may or may not have embraced Lady L. on its steps, but it falls to William Tayler to say what it looks like: ‘Went on the pier. This is a kind of bridge projecting into the sea a quarter of a mile. It’s a great curiosity as it’s hung on chains.’ And his description of election day in Brighton could hardly be bettered.

The somewhat stiff and serious Henry Crabb Robinson was a literary type, one who knew good art and theatre when he saw it. He was also a faithful diarist and kept historically useful notes on the London cultural scene. By the time he began visiting Brighton, George IV had died and his younger brother William had taken the throne. Although King William IV did continue to use the Pavilion (Mantell, in his diary, describes this King’s first entry into Brighton along London Road), he only lasted until 1837. His successor, Queen Victoria, disliked Brighton, and the Pavilion was sold by the government to the town in 1850. By this time, though, nearly half a century of royal patronage had seen Brighton grow into a large, rich, thriving town.

Although Robinson’s visits span some thirty-five years, it was his interest in a brilliant young preacher that took him regularly to Brighton in the early 1850s. This is how he described Frederick William Robertson in his diary: ‘The best preacher I ever saw in a pulpit; that is, uniting the greatest number of excellences, originality, piety, freedom of thought, and warmth of love. His style colloquial and very scriptural. He combined light of the intellect with warmth of the affections in a pre-eminent degree.’ After his death, Robinson and Lady Byron, who was another of the preacher’s fans, worked together to publicise his teachings and publish his sermons.

Xue Fucheng has the distinction of being the only foreign diarist in this book, and very foreign he was too. China, which had followed an isolationist policy for so long, was under great pressure from world powers to open up its markets to trade and its culture to new ways. Somewhat belatedly, the ruling Qing Dynasty decided to send ambassadors abroad to liaise with, and learn more about, these powers. Xue Fucheng, a distinguished academic, was dispatched to Europe, where he stayed a few years in London. While there, he tried hard to understand, and sometimes copy, the traditions of the local inhabitants. One of these was to take a summer holiday by the seaside. Which is how Xue Fucheng and his family and his interpreter spent several weeks in Brighton, and how one day on the ‘new pier’ he watched ‘a performance of a flea circus and marvelled at a flea pulling a cart around.’

Around the same time that Xue Fucheng was learning about the British way of life, and taking a summer holiday in Brighton, Henry Peerless, a Brighton businessman, was beginning to discover the joys of using his summer holidays to travel around Britain and discover different seaside resorts. Because he only kept a diary during his holidays, the references to his home town are largely confined to leavings and returnings. He does, however, also take great delight in comparing, usually favourably, Brighton’s attractions to those of the places he’s visiting. Thus, although Bournemouth may appear more modern and have more natural beauties, ‘our greatest asset still is that only 52 miles separates us from the great metropolis’.

Four authors are next, all of them well-known, and all extraordinary, but very different, diarists. Arnold Bennett is famous for his novels set in the English Midlands, and for his naturalist style. He spent a few months one winter in Brighton, during which time he was writing Clayhanger, the first of his famous Clayhanger series. Moreover, his experience in and of Brighton then contributed significantly to the second novel in the series, Hilda Lessways. His voluminous diaries have been compared to Pepys, and to the great Parisian diarists of the realist/naturalist movement, Edmond and Jules Goncourt.

‘I have always thought it would be unwholesome of me to attempt to write a diary. I’m sure it will make me think my life drab and strain after sensation to make copy for my autobiography.’ This is how Lady Cynthia Asquith begins her first diary, but there is very little evidence in it of her needing to ‘strain after sensation’. Her life during the First World War – the only period of her diaries to be published – appears to have been full of movement, people and challenges of one sort or another. Her husband, the Prime Minister’s son, enlisted in the army and was stationed for a while in Brighton. Their children were also lodged there at times, while she herself moved around – ‘cuckooing’ as she called it – without a proper home. She has been described as one of the most fascinatingly beautiful women of her time, but also as the greatest flirt that ever lived. Her diaries provide a startlingly open and self-absorbed account of a life so privileged on the surface but affected deeply and painfully by the pressures of marriage, children, war, and her own intense social needs.

Virginia Woolf, one of the most famous of twentieth-century British novelists, was also a diarist of some distinction. She lived for much of her short life near Brighton at Rodmell and often visited to go shopping. She loved browsing the second-hand books shops or taking afternoon tea, though could be impatient with the ordinary people she found there, and once wrote about Brighton as ‘a love-corner for slugs’. For much of her life she was on intimate terms with Vita Sackville-West, who was married to Harold Nicolson. They lived further east in Kent at Sissinghurst. Nicolson, too, was a diarist of the first rank, though he mentioned Brighton only a couple of times in his diary – notably when he came to dispose of the ashes of his mother-in-law, who had lived in Brighton.

During the Second World War many people across the country were encouraged to keep diaries by a social research organisation called Mass Observation. The organisation has been through a number of changes since then, but holds a large volume of papers from during and after the war which are stored in the Special Collections department of the University of Sussex. Within the archive are two A4-sized volumes titled ‘Boots Scribbling Diary’, one for 1940 and the other for 1941, kept by Olive Stammer. At the time she was in her early thirties and unmarried. Her brother, George, was away serving in the army. The two diaries are packed full of Olive’s daily notes, mostly announcements by the British government or major news items from abroad. However, she also recorded local events, such as ‘Mine washed up at Hove. Traffic diverted’, and her own experiences such as, ‘Saw soldier motor cyclist laying London Road this morning with broken leg, lorry cut out of Baker St on wrong side.’

A vivid contrast to Olive Stammer’s sober record of the early years of the war is provided by Tony Simmonds and his exuberant teenage language about the latter years, including VE day: ‘People just went mad – dancing, singing, chanting, shouting – the crowd just surged this way and that [. . .] fire crackers, flares and even pre-war “jumpers” were thrown about the streets – even into busses – all policemen “had their eyes shut”. ’ Extracts from Tony’s diaries can be found in a book of war memories published by a Brighton community publisher, QueenSpark, and online thanks to the most excellent community website, My Brighton & Hove.

Much more recently, in 2007, a number of organisations – including QueenSpark, My Brighton & Hove and Mass Observation – collaborated in a project called ‘Letter in the Attic’. Following an appeal to the public, some 800 unpublished personal items, such as letters, diaries and photos, were collected, archived and digitalised. The earliest of them go back to the first half of the nineteenth century. The collection, which can now be searched and viewed online, is also the basis of an online exhibition and a set of educational resources. Surprisingly, perhaps, it contains relatively few diaries. Short extracts from three diarists are included here: Hinda Harris who was keen on the cinema during the war; Jane Lucas who was a student in the 1970s; and Sharon Fosdyke who passed through Brighton in the early 1990s on a tour of the south coast.

In his mid-fifties, Des Marshall moved from his familiar haunts in Camden, London, to live in Brighton, and stayed a little over two years. His life hitherto had not been easy, chronically ill as a child and chronically vulnerable to mental illness as an adult, he was always at odds with society, and constantly searching for answers. In 1994, he says, he met a man calling himself Urban Robinson Crusoe: ‘Small, nervous, thin faced, he didn’t look very well.’ And, he explains, it was Crusoe – not Marshall – who kept a diary. Less than five years later, it was published by Saxon Books with the title Journal of an Urban Robinson Crusoe. Marshall, aka Crusoe, chronicles the life he finds at street level, and in trying to explain this life to himself, he paints a surprisingly accurate portrait of modern Brighton as a ‘tinsel town’ where ‘anything goes’ and people ‘seem very excited and distracted’.

Ten years later, and almost to the present day, Ross Reeves is very much a typical Brighton resident: young, good-looking, gay, alternatively but very well-dressed, into music, and likely to move on after a while. Having started to write a diary while travelling all over the world, he found he couldn’t stop. He came to Brighton in 2004, and felt like he’d arrived at his home. His unpublished diaries are beautifully written. Although, like many diarists, he writes about friends and relationships often, and analyses his own behaviour, he also gives lovely insights into modern-day life in the city, such as when he and his friends celebrated Guy Fawkes night – on an allotment: ‘We managed to light up the allotment valley in fantastic colours. Had a great night, buzzing and dancing until the early hrs of course.’

Like Ross, my own commitment to keeping a diary evolved when I was travelling, though that was a quarter of a century earlier, in the 1970s. On my return from distant parts, I made friends with Rosy and Andrew who soon moved with their young children to live in Brighton. I was a regular visitor, drawn by their warm personalities and open house. Later, when I was still living in London for work, my partner and young son moved to North Laine for a few years, and I became a half-time resident, loving the beach, and the sea, and the parks, and the festivals, and the music, and the pubs, and the nearby Downs.

This book, thus, is essentially a collection of cameos of people, famous and ordinary, young and old, serious and cynical, but with Brighton always setting the scene: like a play, perhaps, in which, despite a medley of brilliant actors and a plot full of intriguing story-lines, it is the set, the backdrop that really steals the show.

Notes about the texts

Diary extracts quoted throughout the book, and only diary extracts, are indented, and do not have quotation marks. Other quotations, of which there are many (edi-tor’s comments, biographical material, other material by the diarists) are in the same font as the narrative but within quotation marks.

Although the original diary texts have been kept as close to the original as found in the published version used, I have made minor editorial alterations here and there.

Mostly I have left the spelling and punctuation as I found it, mistakes and inconsistencies included. But, as I have not consulted original handwritten documents, all spellings and punctuation, whether old-fashioned or mistakes, originate from the published versions, and may or may not have been modified in some way from the originals.

I have not always kept faithful to the paragraph spacing within diary texts as found in the published versions they are taken from – opting sometimes to include/exclude paragraph breaks.

More significantly, perhaps, I have cherry-picked extracts without indicating precisely what’s been left out. While generally speaking I have used [. . .] to indicate text missing in the middle of an extract, I have not done so for text left out from the beginning or end of a chosen extract. (NB: Original texts themselves sometimes include trailing dots so where these are part of the quote they are not enclosed in square brackets.) Similarly, in a sequence of dated extracts, I have not indicated where whole entries might have been omitted.

Also, I have tried to impose some consistency on the use of quotation marks within diary texts, using double quotation marks where diarists have quoted speech or other texts. For the names of books, plays etc. I have opted for a standard use of single quotation marks within diary texts (although within my own commentary, as is modern practice, I have used italics).

Otherwise, where not confusing or useful, I have tried to replicate the use of capitals and italics within the diary texts as I found them.

Round brackets within a diary text are part of the quotation. Square brackets, however, are not. They are always about providing relevant information. Sometimes this information is provided in the original publication itself in a square bracket (a missing word perhaps), or else as a footnote (and occasionally I quote the footnote verbatim, in single quotation marks). Here and there, though, I have also used square brackets to clarify the meaning of a word, or to give more information on a person.

I have also chosen to impose consistency on the dates, so these are never part of the quotation itself; where a location is included, however, on the next line, this does form part of the quote.

All side headlines are my own.

Paul K Lyons, 2011

Acknowledgements

I am indebted for their help to the library staff at Brighton’s Jubilee Library and History Centre, and at the University of Sussex Special Collections, and to John Farrant.

Thanks to: Oxford University Press for permission to quote from The Journal of Gideon Mantell, Surgeon and Geologist as edited by E. Cecil Curwen; to the Marylebone Society for kindly allowing me permission to use extracts from Diary of William Tayler, Footman, 1837 as edited by Dorothy Wise; to Palgrave Macmillan for permission to quote from The European Diary of Hsieh Fucheng: Envoy Extraodinary of Imperial China as edited by Douglas Howland, translated by Helen Hsieh Chien and published by 119St Martin’s Press; to Edward Fenton for generously allowing me to use extracts from A Brief Jolly Change published by Day Books; to Orion Books for permission to quote from The Journals of Arnold Bennett 1896-1928 as edited by Newman Flower and published by Cassell; to Random House for permission to use extracts from the diaries of Cynthia Asquith (Hutchinson) and the diaries of Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press); and to Juliet Nicolson for kindly allowing me to quote from her grandfather’s diaries.

The Olive Stammer diaries are held by the University of Sussex Special Collections which granted permission for their use. Despite best efforts, however, no copyright holder has been traced.

I am very grateful to Tony Simmonds for allowing me to include extracts from his wartime diary, and for patiently answering my questions; as well as to Jane Lucas and Sharon Fosdyke who let me make use of their contributions to the ‘Letter in the Attic’ project, and to Sophie Harris who allowed me to use some diary entries she had chosen for the same project but which were written by her aunt, Hinda Harris. Many thanks also to QueenSpark, the Brighton and Hove community publisher which organised the ‘Letter in the Attic’ project, for help in contacting the diarists. Des Marshall and his publisher were kind enough to allow me use of extracts from Journal of an Urban Robinson Crusoe published by Saxon Books. A special thank you to Ross Reeves who generously (and patiently) allowed me to look through his private diaries and choose some extracts for publication.

Last but not least a multitude of thanks to Hat and JG for their advice, time and many other helpful contributions.

Pictures and picture acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Samuel Pepys, engraving by Geoffrey Kneller; Chapter 2: ‘A Modern Hell’ from Egan’s Real Life in London, illustrated by Rowlandson and Alken; Chapter 3: Frances d’Arblay by Henry Colburn, London, 1842; Chapter 4: Joseph Farington from a drawing by George Dance; Chapter 5: ‘Packing up after a Country Ball’, by Richard Dighton, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-85550; Chapter 6: ‘Merrymaking on the Regent’s Birthday’, 1812, by George Cruikshank, Library of Congress, CLC-DIG-ppmsca-04317; Chapter 7: The Pavilion, Brighton, by Henry Wallis, in Dugdale’s early Victorian collection Curiosities of England; Chapter 8: ‘The Rival Queens’ (Mrs Fitzherbert on the left being held by the Prince of Wales) by S.W. Fores, Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-6452; Chapter 9: Gideon Mantell by J. J. Masquerier (used by permission ©19thcenturyscience.org); Chapter 10: George IV (1828 statue in Brighton – photograph © Paul K Lyons); Chapter 11: Brighton Chain Pier in the 1820s, courtesy of Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove; Chapter 12: Walter Scott (artist unknown), Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsc-07693; Chapter 13: Tattersalls, as seen in Egan’s Real Life in London, illustrated by Rowlandson and Alken; Chapter 14: Brighton beach (old postcard); Chapter 15: Henry Crabb Robinson, engraving by William Holl; Chapter 16: Brighton beach (and bathing machines), Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsc-08043; Chapter 17: Brighton beach and pier, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsc-08044; Chapter 18: Arnold Bennett by Oliver Herford, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-100959; Chapter 19: ‘Rally around the Flag’, published by the War Office in 1914, Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-11310; Chapter 20: Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry (photograph © Paul K Lyons); Chapter 21: Olive Stammer’s diary by permission from Special Collections, University of Sussex (photograph © Paul K Lyons); Chapter 22: Tony Simmonds (photograph used by permission from Tony Simmonds); Chapter 23: Brighton Pavilion (photograph © Paul K Lyons); Chapter 24: Brighton street (photograph © Paul K Lyons); Chapter 25: Ross Reeves by Keith Elliot (photograph © Keith Elliot); Chapter 26: Barbara and Fred (Paul’s parents) on Brighton Pier in 1951 (photograph used by permission).

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Samuel Pepys and Charles II walking on the quarterdeck

The first reference to Brighton – or Brighthelmstone as it was then – in any diary occurs as early as 1660, thanks to a precocious young man called Sam, who would in time become the most famous diarist in history, and Charles who was in the process of returning to England to be King. At the time, Samuel Pepys was with a fleet of ships, led by his relative Sir Edward Montagu, that had sailed to the Netherlands to bring the future Charles II back from exile. There was ‘a fresh gale and most happy weather’, and Charles was walking on the quarterdeck recounting the details of his escape, nearly a decade earlier, after the Battle of Worcester. Sam was listening, avidly, almost in tears.

In the 1640s, King Charles I was engaged in a fierce struggle for power with the English and Scottish Parliaments. Having been defeated in the First Civil War (1642-1645), he remained defiant by trying to make an alliance with Scotland. This provoked the Second Civil War (1648-1649) which Charles also lost. Then, having been captured and convicted for high treason, he lost his head too. While the monarchy was being abolished and Oliver Cromwell was establishing a republic called the Commonwealth of England, Charles I’s son, Charles, was on the run. He made his way north to Scotland, where he was proclaimed Charles II King of Scots.

There he formed an army of Scots Royalists, 12,000 strong, and, in 1651, marched south, hoping to raise military support in England against the Parliament. He met with little opposition, but was unable to enlist many new recruits either. He occupied Worcester on 22 August, and the next day was proclaimed King. Less than a week later, Cromwell arrived with 30,000 men, and a few days after that, they attacked the city. On 3 September, Cromwell’s Roundheads finally and brutally crushed the Royalist army thus bringing the Civil War to its end. Charles managed to escape, first to Boscobel nearby where he famously hid in a tree, and then he was on the run again, this time for six weeks, often hiding in barns and disguised as a countryman. He arrived in Sussex on 14 October, passing through Arundel and Beeding, before reaching Brighton. He stayed one night and then sailed from Shoreham to safety in France. It would be nine years before his return to England and his restoration to the English throne.

The story of Charles II’s adventurous and romantic escape through and from England was initially written by Thomas Blount, a lawyer and lexicographer, and published as early as 1660, the year of Charles II restoration to the monarchy, but has been republished many times. Later volumes include a narrative of his escape told by Charles to Samuel Pepys in 1680, of which Pepys made a written record, long after he’d stopped keeping a diary. Here is part of that narrative in which Charles II tells the story of his stay in Brighton, and of several people who recognised him there!

King Charles’s version of his escape

‘We went to a place, four miles off Shoreham, called Brighthelmstone, where we were to meet with the master of the ship, as thinking it more convenient to meet there than just at Shoreham, where the ship was. So when we came to the inn at Brighthelmstone we met with one, the merchant who had hired the vessel, in company with her master [Nicholas Tettersell, or Tattersell], the merchant only knowing me, as having hired her only to carry over a person of quality that was escaped from the battle of Worcester without naming anybody.

And as we were all sitting together (viz, Robin Philips, my Lord Wilmot, Colonel Gunter, the merchant, the master, and I), I observed that the master of the vessel looked very much upon me. And as soon as we had supped, calling the merchant aside, the master told him that he had not dealt fairly with him; for though he had given him a very good price for the carrying over that gentleman, yet he had not been clear with him; for,’ says he, ‘he is the king, and I very well know him to be so.’ Upon which, the merchant denying it, saying that he was mistaken, the master answered, ‘I know him very well, for he took my ship, together with other fishing vessels at Brighthelmstone, in the year 1648’ (which was when I commanded the king my father’s fleet, and I very kindly let them go again). ‘But,’ says he to the merchant, ‘be not troubled at it, for I think I do God and my country good service in preserving the king, and, by the grace of God, I will venture my life and all for him, and set him safely on shore, if I can, in France.’ Upon which the merchant came and told me what had passed between them, and thereby found myself under a necessity of trusting him. But I took no kind of notice of it presently to him; but thinking it convenient not to let him go home, lest he should be asking advice of his wife, or anybody else, we kept him with us in the inn, and sat up all night drinking beer, and taking tobacco with him.

And here I also run another very great danger, as being confident I was known by the master of the inn; for as I was standing, after supper, by the fireside, leaning my hand upon a chair, and all the rest of the company being gone into another room, the master of the inn came in, and fell a-talking with me, and just as he was looking about, and saw there was nobody in the room, he, upon a sudden, kissed my hand that was upon the back of the chair, and said to me, ‘God bless you wheresover you go! I do not doubt, before I die, but to be a lord, and my wife a lady.’ So I laughed, and went away into the next room, not desiring then any further discourse with him, there being no remedy against my being known by him, and more discourse might have but raised suspicion. On which consideration, I thought it best for to trust him in that manner, and he proved very honest.

About four o’clock in the morning, myself and the company before named went towards Shoreham, taking the master of the ship with us, on horseback, behind one of our company, and came to the vessel’s side, which was not above sixty ton. But it being low water, and the vessel lying dry, I and my Lord Wilmot got up with a ladder into her, and went and lay down in the little cabin, till the tide came to fetch us off.’

Of Tettersell and The George

There are two other sources of information about Charles’s escape as far as Sussex and Brighton are concerned: Colonel Gunter’s narrative printed in Parry’s An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Coast of Sussex, and Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicles of the Kings of England which is thought to rely on a version of events provided by Tettersell, captain of the escape ship, a coal carrying coaster. Through these sources we know that Charles and his group left on horseback for Shoreham at 4 in the morning; that Tettersell managed to bargain a high price of £200 for the use of his ship; and that the inn was called The George.

There is a little more to know about both Tettersell and The George. Apart from his £200, Captain Tettersell did very well out of the escapade. Once Charles II was restored to the throne, he was granted a pension of £100 per year, and his ship, Surprise, was transferred into the Royal Navy’s fleet and renamed The Royal Escape. His memorial is the oldest in the churchyard of Brighton’s St Nicholas.

As for The George, there has been much debate down the centuries as to the actual building where Charles slept. In the 1880s, Frederick E. Sawyer, a well-known and prolific writer on Brighton’s history, argued with painstaking evidence that it was not, as was generally assumed at the time, The King’s Head in West Street (having been renamed in honour of the King’s stay). He found evidence that The King’s Head was not even an inn in the mid-seventeenth century, but part of a tenement, and that there had been a pub called The George in Middle Street – on the site of number 44 – and that this, therefore, must have been where Charles stayed. Despite Sawyer’s research, the idea that Charles stayed at The King’s Head in West Street is widely reiterated in tourist literature.

Today, more than 350 years later, there are two significant cultural celebrations of Charles II’s great escape story. One is the Monarch’s Way, a 615 mile footpath which traces Charles’s route from Worcester to Shoreham. The other is the annual Royal Escape Race from Shoreham to Fécamp in France which, according to the Sussex Yacht Club, draws large mixed fleets of hard-core racers, family cruisers and gaff rigged classics.

Pepys and his diary

All of which is to stray from Pepys – the most famous diarist in the English language. Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to suggest that he is to diaries what Shakespeare is to plays. Although born in humble circumstances, the son of a tailor, Pepys was also related to nobility. By dint of his family connections, hard work, intelligence, and considerable social skills, Pepys rose quickly through the civil service ranks eventually to become Chief Secretary to the Admiralty under both Charles II and James II. In 1662, he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London on suspicion of spying for France and of being a Papist, but later on became an MP, and president of the Royal Society (serving as such when Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica).

Pepys started keeping a diary on New Year’s Day in 1660, and stopped in May 1669 – because he felt that writing was bad for his ailing sight. But in those ten years, he not only provided a gloriously detailed picture of the Restoration period, but a first-hand account of several important historical events, not least the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Great Plague, and the Great Fire of London. With meticulous detail and literary skill he recorded everything, from tragic to the comic, from his own weaknesses and frailties to grand affairs of state. Indeed, the diaries reveal a man as comfortable presenting Navy affairs to Parliament as philandering with servant girls.

Written in a shorthand code, the diaries were not deciphered or published until the 1820s. Other editions followed in the nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Robert Latham and William Matthews transcribed and edited the complete diary for publication in nine volumes published by Bell & Hyman, London, and the University of California Press, Berkeley. Most of this edition is now available on the internet thanks to The Diary of Samuel Pepys website run by Phil Gyford, which also has a Pepys encyclopaedia, in-depth essays, and a lively forum for debate.

So, finally then, thanks to Sam, here is that first reference to Brighton in a diary.

The master of the house did know him

23 May 1660